Stephane Ackermann, Artistic Director of ARTINTERNATIONAL has curated a series of performances, installations and interventions for the 2015 edition. This year’s programme will present works by seven artists which will be presented across the fair.

Artist and photographer Ali Taptik presents a series of images, titled ‘It’s Not Fair’. The work examines the incongruous nature of being an artist, where daily encounters and situations cut across class and social boundaries. Taptik’s images range from encounters between workers and bosses, to strolls through penthouses and construction sites. Captured over a number of years without the intention of being included as a single body of work, the artist adds a further layer to the imagery by obscuring the faces and identities of his subjects – inserting in their place his own notes about the specific people including personal details that defy generalized classifications.

New York and Istanbul-based artist Arslan Sukan draws parallels between the fashion and art scene, examining the frequently complicit relationship these two industries share in the context of the art fair. Developing work whilst at ARTINTERNATIONAL, Sukan documents the fair via a style reporter, capturing dealers, collectors and visitors alike over the course of the fair.

Berlin-based artist Burcak Konukman presents his performance ‘I am an independent artist’ – a nomadic fair booth will be moving from one place to another during the fair, symbolizing his career and international voyages he has to make to create his performances.

Artist Dominique Petitgand presents a sound installation based on sound diffused with voices, noises, music and silences. The work is presented in a dark room at the fair to enhance the short stereo sound pieces, which consist of spoken words, sound, music and silence. Fragments of stories, monologues, descriptions, exhalations, miniature landscapes, close and far sounds follow each other. Each session is structured by silences (inside the pieces and between them). Every spoken word in French is accompanied by its oral translation, in English: this added translation becomes a new sound element of the composition and constitutes a form of commentary, at once incarnated and suggestive.

Istanbul-based artist Hera Büyüktaşcıyan presents Falling Waters, a dramatic installation, which stretches from the fair’s screening room through to the main hall.

New York based artist Maya Hayuk presents one of her large-scale murals, which speak of the artist’s obsession with symmetry, perfect imperfection and outer and inner space and blend the traditional and the contemporary into works which appear as harmonic, dissonant and optimistic compositions.

Additional highlights of the programme include the debut of MOVE, a wry performance by the Berlin-based artist Nevin Aladağ, taking place in and around the fair, that explores the social ritual of moving and engaging in public space.

Moving Image welcomed artists, galleries and non-profit institutions in their second edition in Istanbul this fall. Returning to the Kuleli Building at the Halic Congress Center from 4-6 September 2015, Moving Image Istanbul ran in parallel with ArtInternational art fair, and presented a selection of single-channel videos and installations from across the globe.

For this year's edition Moving Image's founders - New York gallerists Edward Winkelmann and Murat Ozorobekov - could celebrate a record attendance of 6,500 people in three days. This number exceeded their best-ever attendance for the New York editions.

Our personal highlight of the show was Michael Nyman's multi-screen video installation of 12 monitors titled 'NYman with a Movie Camera'. It features ten independent, yet interrelated, edits of Nyman's 2009 film 'NYman with a Movie Camera', all of which engage in a visual discourse with Dziga Vertov's 1929 film 'Man with a Movie Camera', presented in its entirety on an eleventh screen.

Other highlights of the 2015 Istanbul fair included several world premieres, such as works by Zeyno Pekünlü (Sanatorium, Istanbul), Leo Gabin (Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York), Carlos Jiménez Cahua (Samsøn Projects, Boston), Wu Ding (L-Art Gallery, Chengdu), and João Castilho (Zipper Galeria, São Paulo). Among the historical selections in the fair are works by Ana Mendieta (Galerie Lelong, New York) and Martha Wilson (P·P·O·W Gallery, New York). Large installations include works by Kon Trubkovich (Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York), and Michael Nyman (Myriam Blundell Projects, London).

Among the special events sponsored by Moving Image Istanbul were ‚Bring Your own Beamer’ (BYOB) at Pera Museum, and a screening of ‚Ways of Something', a project by Lorna Mills, hosted by Transfer Gallery. BYOB was a one-night exhibition/performance by unrepresented, emerging Turkish film and video artists taking over the ground floor gallery hall of Pera Museum in an improvised installation. Curated by Maybe Art Projects, BYOB at Pera Museum took place on Friday, 4 September 2015 from 7-10pm. Transfer Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) presented a special screening of ‚Ways of Something’ compiled by Lorna Mills on Sunday, 6 September 2015, 5-6pm in the Gallerist Lounge at Moving Image.

The 14th Istanbul Biennial titled SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) and drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev with a number of alliances, opened to the public on 5 September running until 1 November 2015. The exhibition takes place in over 30 venues on the European and Asian sides of the Bosphorus, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, from Beyoğlu to Büyükada, from Rumelifeneri to the old city and from Şişli to Kadıköy.

Venues

Displayed in the European and Asian sides of the Bosphorus, SALTWATER takes place in museums as well as temporary spaces of habitation on land and on sea such as boats, hotels, former banks, garages, gardens, schools, shops and private houses. There are venues where the visitors will encounter a group exhibition, such as Istanbul Modern, ARTER, the Italian High School, and the Galata Greek Primary School, but most locations host the work of a single artist or artist collective.

Exhibition venues at the Galata-Tophane-Beyoğlu route are: SALT Galata, Vault Karaköy The House Hotel, Kasa Galeri, Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul Modern, a floating boat on Bosphorus, DEPO, two garages on Boğazkesen Street and Çukurcuma Street and a store on Boğazkesen Street, the Museum of Innocence, the Italian High School, one of three fictional venues of the biennial French Orphanage, The House Hotel Galatasaray, a house on Bostanbaşı Street, Cezayir building, another fictional venue of the biennial Casa Garibaldi, ARTER, once the Anatolian Passage and now a shoe store FLO Building, Pera Museum, a room in the Adahan Hotel and the Adahan Cistern.

The venues in Şişli-the Old City-the Northern Bosphorus route are: Hrant Dink Foundation and Agos as well as Hrant Dink Foundation and Agos – Centre for Parrhesia, Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam, Rumeli Feneri, and another fictional venue of the biennial Riva Beach.

Finally, a provisional biennial venue will be Kastellorizo, a Greek island two kilometres away from the Turkish coast. The weeklong project in collaboration with the Fiorucci Art Trust titled “The violent No! of the sun burns the forehead of hills. Sand fleas arrive from salt lake and most of the theatres close” will take place there from 7 to 13 September 2015.

The exhibition presents over 1,500 artworks, including commissions by artists as well as other materials from the history of oceanography, environmental studies, marine archaeology, Art Nouveau, neuroscience, physics, mathematics and theosophy, and some crystals that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gathered with a friend at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake in early 2015.

Works at the biennial range historically from an 1870 painting of waves by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who received a Nobel prize in 1906 for discovering the neuron, to the ground-breaking abstract Thought Forms of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater (1901-1905), a new work by Füsun Onur where a poem is heard on a moving boat, up to a cultural meeting point between Chicago and Istanbul by Theaster Gates.

Amongst the most evident artistic projects to explore irregular wave patterns and organic growth is the work of Christine Taylor Patten, a series of 1,000 tiny one-inch square drawings titled ‘micros’ with minimal materials such as a crow-quill pen and black ink on paper. Anna Boghiguian’s The Salt Traders, a grand, sculptural installation of old sails, paintings, drawings, fragments of a boat and sound recordings, Cevdet Erek’s new installation A Room of Rhythms – Otopark in an old car park built in 1940 in Tophane, the last episode of Wael Shawky’s epic video trilogy, Cabaret Crusades: The Secrets of Karbala, that will include glimpses of the Battle of Karbala, a sculptural installation of crates from which art objects seem to have escaped, referring to the need for art to be freed from its hoarding in the age of creative capitalism by Walid Raad in a former bank vault on Bankalar Street, Kasa Galeri, William Kentridge’s new multi-channel video and sculptural installation, inspired by the presence and exile of Leon Trotsky on Büyükada island in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Adrián Villar Rojas who creates monumental sculptures emplaced in the sea by the shore of the Trotsky House in Büyükada, and Pierre Huyghe’s Abyssal Plain, a long-term underwater project.

Conversations between different fields of knowledge occur in a long, narrow space that Carolyn Christov Bakargiev calls the Channel, where works range from those by oceanographer Emin Özsoy, and Jeffrey Peakall to D’Aronco’s drawings and drawings of knots made by Jacques Lacan in the 1970’s, alongside the ‘knotty’ paintings of Brazilian artist Frans Krajcberg, as well as a selection of late nineteenth- century Art Nouveau vases by Émile Gallé and drawings by Patrick Blanc for his vertical gardens will be displayed.

The biennial speaks about the transformative agency and potential that art can have, its ‘use-ability’, through the struggles for Aboriginal rights of the Yolngu people of North-east Arnhem Land in Queensland, and how their struggles have resulted in laws being changed and rights being acknowledged throughout Australia. A selection of Yirrkala drawings including a colourful series of drawings on brown paper made in 1947, the Bark Petitions of 1963, and the Saltwater Paintings of 1998–2008, are displayed.

For the 25th edition of its festival, EUROPALIA will be putting the spotlight on cultural heritage from Turkey with a program including fine arts, music, photography, cinema, theatre, dance, literature, architecture, design, fashion and gastronomy. The choice for Turkey as its country of focus is based on the increased economic developments the country has undergone in the last two decades. The country’s status as a cultural melting pot and „The cradle of civilization’, bridging Europe and Asia adds to its allure. In light of its anniversary the festival has updated its mission, increasing its focus on: heritage projects, contemporary projects, exchange and new creations. These elements will be integrated in the upcoming edition for the first time. This means that next to focusing on the country’s history, contemporary artists from Turkey will also take on an important part in this project. In particular, collaborations between young Belgian and up-and-coming artists from Turkey will stimulate an intercultural dialogue and exchange.

Next to solo- and duo-exhibitions including artists from Turkey, there will also be large overview of works related to Istanbul. The centre of Fine Arts in Brussels will show Imagine Istanbul showcasing artists of the 20th century with works which demonstrate the character of this vast city. Similarly MAS will open Port City Talks focusing on Antwerp and Istanbul as port cities, which also involved residency projects for artists from Turkey. In Wavelengths the young Turkish multimedia and digital art scene will be represented by various events in Brussels, lasting from October until December. In Antwerp, the M HKA is dedicating an exhibition titled Democratic Luxury to Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. This artist, who died in 2007, left an oeuvre that has played and still plays a key role in contemporary Turkish art. The exhibition at the M HKA is part of a small but powerful series within the festival that brings internationally renowned Turkish artists to Belgium where they are rarely if ever exhibited. As well as Alptekin, this series features two great women artists, Ayşe Erkmen and Gülsün Karamustafa. Erkmen will enter into dialogue with Ann-Veronica Janssens at the SMAK, while at the Centrale for Contemporary Art and Argos, Karamustafa will encounter Koen Theys and Kasper Bosmans.

Akbank Sanat opens the new season with an exhibition featuring one of the most influential female artists of the 20th century titled Louise Bourgeois: Larger than Life
Running from 1 September until 28 November and curated by Prof. Dr. Hasan Bulent Kahraman, this exhibition shows 58 works of the artist, who has never been exhibited in Turkey despite an incorporated work at the 5th Istanbul Biennial in1997. A series of conferences will complement the exhibition and there will be an area of the Akbank Art Library dedicated to the artist.

With a consolidated focus on galleries from Eastern Europe and the participation of almost all leading Viennese galleries, the fair keeps strengthening the status of Vienna as an attractive venue for contemporary art.

This year for the first time, galleries Christian Lethert and Hammelehle and Ahrens from Cologne is present at the fair. Two more new entrants at viennacontemporary come from Paris: Bernard Bouche, who brings three artistic positions to Vienna (Carlo Guaita, John Murphy, and José Pedro Croft) and Caroline Smulders with a solo presentation of Tokyo-born artist Kimiko Yoshida. Other newcomers from Western Europe include Boccanera from Trento and Anna Jill Lüpertz from Berlin. Stefan Lundgren Gallery from Palma de Mallorca/Spain presents two US artists, Luis Gispert and Jacolby Satterwhite, for the first time in Vienna. Further interesting new participants come from the focus region Eastern Europe, such as up-and-coming Triangle Gallery from Moscow. Yay Gallery, which was founded in 2012, comes from Baku/Azerbaijan. Eastward Prospectus from Bucharest, which was only founded last year by Andrei Breahnă and Raluca Şoaita, show a solo presentation of Marilena Preda Sânc at the fair. And for the first time, Fait Gallery from Brno/Czech Republic joins viennacontemporary this year.

After the focus countries Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus (2012), Georgia and Poland (2013) and Azerbaijan (2014), viennacontemporary is taking a look at Bulgaria in 2015 with "Focus Bulgaria".

With its presentation format REFLECTIONS, viennacontemporary underlines the curatorial aspect of gallery work and offers participating galleries a particular presentation platform for exhibitions that have been specifically conceived for the fair.

Viennacontemporary’s ZONE1 allows galleries to present young artists in solo exhibitions at special conditions. The project, which up to now has been restricted to Austrian galleries, are also be open to international artists this year.

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